Who needs a printing press, or even a satnav?
Published: Tue, 07/10/18
Sunday evening I had to drive back from Beverley to Epsom. I had a preaching appointment at 6.30pm so I could not leave much before 9pm but that was okay, it meant I would reach the M25 around midnight and so should not have any problems with traffic. I would also be ready to get started on our current job in good time on Monday morning. I decided to take the Humber bridge, the Lincoln road, and then the A1 not the fastest route, but it is the shortest and slightly more interesting than the major motorways all the way.
It was all going fine until I discovered that the A46 was closed, blocking the route to Newark and the A1. I tried following the diverted traffic signs but I have no idea what the intended alternative route was and it was so erratically signed anyway that I could not follow it. Eventually I ended up back where I started from and still unable to leave Lincoln. My satnav was of no help because it just kept trying to send me along the blocked route.
Then I did what I should have done at the first sign of a diversion. I pulled over, got out the road atlas and worked out where I was on the map. It was then clear that a road opposite to where I was parked would take me to a village a couple of miles away. From there I could pick up signs to the next village and then back onto the A47. In reality the detour needed to have only cost me about ten minutes, rather than nearly the hour it did take to get back on route. Okay, I should have reached for the old paper atlas as a first rather than a last resort. Problem is that I have rather got into the habit of relying on satnav, although to be fair, I wasn’t using the satnav at all on that stage of the journey since I know that route very well anyway. If I had known what was coming I would have just taken a different route. I also made the mistake of assuming that whoever set up the diverted route wasn’t a complete moron. Maybe it is
not policy to divert traffic onto minor local roads in case the locals complain about the extra noise at night. Maybe maps are not available to the traffic department any more, I have no idea. All I know is, don’t rely on the planned diversions, get a map out and work it out for yourself. If the diverted route does coincide with your chosen alternative then great, but don’t rely on the officials or your satnav, make sure you carry an old fashioned road atlas as well, and make sure you actually know how to read it too.
Getting back to traditional sources does not just apply to maps and navigation. The writer and business teacher Perry Marshall talks of the importance of reading something every day which was written pre-Gutenberg. Marshall is referring to Johannes Gutenberg who is credited with inventing the printing press, with movable metal type, around the middle of the 15th century. From that time on we have the mass production of literature using printing presses, a process essentially unchanged until the development of digital typesetting which has only occurred within my lifetime. Any literature disseminated before Gutenberg was written by hand. Any copies made were also made by hand. Which means that all the literature we have that dates back before the reign of Henry the 6th of England (1422 to 1471, but not continuously) was written down by hand and copied by hand, maybe many times over many centuries. So, the Bible, everything from
the Greeks and Romans or ancient Mesopotania, the Quran, the Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu Vedas and the Upanishads, of course the recorded Norse mythology in the Eddas and a great deal more. Anything that comes down to us pre-Gutenberg was considered worth writing down by hand on expensive materials such as parchment using awkward writing tools such as quill pens and home made ink. It had to be written by the small minority of people who could actually read and write. And they did not even have electric light to work by on a winter evening. Pre-Gutenberg material was considered valuable enough to be worth the considerable effort of recording and passing on.
Today information is all around us in ever increasing quantities, that has its advantages, I was able to check some names and dates as I wrote this. But sometimes we need some real wisdom to guide us in life, just like the directions for my way out of Lincoln on Sunday night was right there in a road atlas. The guidance we need in life may well be there in something written a thousand or more years ago, ideas and experience which stood the test of being selected and copied over the centuries. Remember the date, about 1450 now check some of this stuff out for yourself.
Of course sometimes you need a bit of prompting as to the best writings to look at. The Foundation Programme introduces the Norse Mythology with some selected stories and suggestions for where to look for more. In August I will be starting the Advanced Runelore programme which will be 24 weekly modules and will go deeply into each of the 16 runes and a great deal more while exploring the mythology in detail. I just need to deliver the last two modules of the Martial/self-protection programme and the ARP is the next project. I would suggest that, unless you are familiar with the basics of Stav, you do the foundation programme first as the ARP will go in pretty deep right from the start. See https://iceandfire.org.uk/foundation.html or just go ahead and join Ice and Fire and you will receive all the programmes that are created over the next couple of years https://iceandfire.org.uk/join.html
regards
Graham
PS In the Old Testament there is the book of Ecclesiastes. In chapter 12 verse 12 the writer complains.
‘Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.’
The book of Ecclesiastes is attributed to King Solomon and was thus written nearly 3000 years ago. I wonder what he would make of our flood of digital information today?